“No... ‘tell me about it beforehand.’ Humiliating! And I do not see any possible light out of this darkness.”
“Why don’t you join a touring company and leave your mother in Vienna?”
“What! Leave my poor, little, sick, widowed mother in Vienna! Sooner than that I would drown myself. I love my mother as I love nobody else in the world—nobody and nothing! Do you think it is impossible to love one’s tragedy? ‘Out of my great sorrows I make my little songs,’ that is Heine or myself.”
“Oh, well, that’s all right,” I said cheerfully.
“But it is not all right!”
I suggested we should turn back. We turned.
“Sometimes I think the solution lies in marriage,” said Fräulein Sonia. “If I find a simple, peaceful man who adores me and will look after mamma—a man who would be for me a pillow—for genius cannot hope to mate—I shall marry him.... You know the Herr Professor has paid me very marked attentions.”
“Oh, Fräulein Sonia,” I said, very pleased with myself, “why not marry him to your mother?” We were passing the hairdresser’s shop at the moment. Fräulein Sonia clutched my arm.
“You, you,” she stammered. “The cruelty. I am going to faint. Mamma to marry again before I marry—the indignity. I am going to faint here and now.”
I was frightened. “You can’t,” I said, shaking her.